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Sep 21, 2013

Plans for the Master Bath

We've been planning to overhaul the master bedroom ensuite bathroom for a couple of years. It's a very tiny room (about 5'x8') and everything in it is over 15 years old. The grout on the floor and in the shower is starting to break down, the shower area is like a little cave, and the drywall below the shower door has completely fallen away and the metal is rusting.

Are you ready for some truly scary pictures?

Horrible, right?

Our plan is to take out the shower wall completely and replace it with a glass wall - this time with a sliding door instead of one that opens outwards. Something like this:

This will give us a little more floor space - right now you have to close the door to get to the medicine cabinet, but you want to leave it open to air out the shower - and it will let the light from the window into the shower area. Also, since the glass wall won't go all the way to the ceiling, there will be more air circulation and hopefully it'll be easier to keep the shower clean.

We're going to replace the vanity and have the entire floor retiled. We saw this Godmorgon vanity at Ikea and liked that it mounts to the wall so more of the floor is visible (making the room look larger).

We liked that it had drawers instead of the usual two-door set up, and the sink/vanity top is all one piece with plenty of flat surface space (the picture above shows the Braviken sink; we'll be getting the Odensvik). We may or may not replace the toilet - there isn't anything wrong with the one we have other than hard water stains - but that'll be something to decide at the end. They aren't that expensive, so it might be nice to have an entirely new room.

After what seems like too long talking about what we'd like to do, we decided that we would hire the work out. We know we can tile, we've done it before in our first house, but we don't have the time to do it properly. This year has been very hard with family illness, and we seem to only have a few hours a week of actual free time. A job that would take a contractor less than a week would probably take us months - just ask us about our kitchen. Plus it would be nice to know we have a guarantee/warranty if something were to go wrong (we're not plumbers, for sure!)

So, with all those decisions made we headed off to the tile store. Talk about overwhelming! So many choices and we had no idea what we wanted. We saw plenty of tile that we kind of liked, but nothing that spoke to us, until we were nearly in the back corner of the showroom. We fell in love with this 8"x20" wall tile in a greyish beige called Splendida Turtle. (Even the name is perfect for us.)

Once we had that, the rest became much easier. It was awesome having a salesperson help us - she ran all over the room with our wall tile in her hands, comparing it to samples until we were happy. We decided on plank style tiles for the floor - they give the appearance of wood - and 2"x2" tiles for the floor. This is what the floor tiles will look like, though we chose a shade lighter:

We brought home samples of each, just to make sure they would actually suit the room. Here they are all together. I like that the floor and wall tiles will be similar, though the floor tiles aren't as shiny and have a bit of roughness to them.

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